Dear Lee,

The department field is very special because it is the only way that we
can apply security profiles.

We have eight curatorial departments, some of these have sub-departments
which represent types of collections:
Examples:
Art of Europe: Paintings (AOE Paintings)
Art of Europe: Decorative Arts (AOE Dec Arts)
Art of the Ancient World: Classical (AAW Classical)
Art of the Ancient World: Egyptian (AAW Egyptian)

There are separate curatorial staffs for these sub-departments.

We also have departments for the Recorder, Registrar, Conservation,
Archives, Library, Exhibition Planning (for the most part, no one but
Sys. Admins. and the staff that use these departments can see any of
their records). We also have a Training department where we can make
junky records to experiment with.

We have also made eight curatorial "Temp." departments and have given
these more liberal security privileges. When records are made for
objects that have not yet entered the building they are assigned to a
Temp dept. (Temp:AOE, Temp:AAW, etc). While records have this
departmental designation, members of that curatorial staff can add
credit lines, change the object status, and add other accessioning data
in order to prepare the record for the next step. Once the object enters
the building, it is registered and the Temp department is changed to the
"real" department name and the security on the record becomes much
stricter.

Culture field: we use this primarily for three-dimensional objects where
the artist/maker is unknown. Because culture information is part of the
information that displays with the linked constituent(s) it would be
redundant to also have that information in the culture field (looks
weird on the web too).

Period field: We use this a lot and have added to its field tag which
now reads: Period, era, dynasty, reign. The years or centuries go into
the Display date field.

Object type field: We have never used this.

We repurposed the Name field (the object title or name are entered in
the Title field). We changed the field tag for the Name field to: Type,
sub-type, shape, sub-shape because this is a field that existed in our
prior database, and because it is on the Front Card where every one who
uses this field wants it see the data.

In answer to your Mayan sculpture question I would use the Query
Assistant to look for *mayan* in the culture field, and select sculpture
from the classification field.

Hope this of some help.

Linda Pulliam
Head of Collections Management
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 


-----Original Message-----
From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Lee Nisbet \eoj
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 12:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Cataloging question--Department field

Dear TMS Users,
We are in the process of writing cataloging standards for our new TMS
system
and would be very appreciative if you could help answer the questions
below.

How do you use your Department field?

(Collection Type)
From what has been seen, there are some museums who use their Department
field to list the types of collections the museum owns (whether that
museum
has those actual departments or not). So in that case, if "Ancient
American"
is one of your Departments, do you also put "Ancient American" in the
Culture field? And "Mayan" in the Period field?

Departments
Culture
Period

OR

(Object Type)
If your Department field is set up based on Type of Object, ie:
Sculpture,
Painting, Architecture, etc. and you want to conduct a search for all
Mayan
sculptures--what fields would you use to find them?


There are no right or wrong answers, we just need more examples from
other
museums to be able to show our curatorial staff.

Many thanks in advance,
Lee Nisbet
Study Storage Supervisor
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
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(919) 684-8262